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Intelligence
A White Paper About What We Learned from Our Research on Social Media in Advancement

Intelligence

A White Paper About What We Learned from Our Research on Social Media in Advancement

Nov 20, 2010By Michael Stoner

All institutions are struggling to engage with their constituents using social media tools. But how are they doing?

With plenty of help from CASE, we set out with our research partners, Slover Linett Strategies to learn how institutions are using social media in advancement and answer some basic questions:

Are constituents commenting, liking, and otherwise interacting with the Facebook pages sponsored by institutions to engage alumni, influence parents, encourage donors, and build awareness of institutional messages and brands? What are barriers to use of social media in institutional advancement? How do we measure success? What does an effective social media program look like?

For the last couple of months, we’ve been working on a white paper summarizing what we learned from that research with CASE. Its finally finished: here’s a PDF of the report.

The white paper offers a look at the data we gathered and offers some of our insights on what we learned—with comments from Andrew Gossen, Charlie Melichar, and Andy Shaindlin, who were instrumental in leading the CASE task force on social media and helped to inspire and shape this research, along with Rae Goldsmith from CASE. It also includes an appendix on how admissions offices are using social media and four case studies illustrating particular effective institutional uses of social media.

If you’d like to take a look at the raw data, you can find it here: Topline Results from the CASE/mStoner/Slover Linett Social Media Survey.

And you can read “Social Experiments,” [note: login required] the article Cheryl Slover-Linett and I wrote about this research for CASE Currents, November/December 2010.


  • Michael Stoner Co-Founder and Co-Owner Was I born a skeptic or did I become one as I watched the hypestorm gather during the dotcom years, recede, and congeal once more as we come to terms with our online, social, mobile world? Whatever. I'm not much interested in cutting edge but what actually works for real people in the real world. Does that make me a bad person?